Reformation 175: Past and Present

Join us as for a day of talks and panel discussions as we commemorate and reflect on the heritage of the Reformation and the future of the Reformed tradition. We will explore Reformed views on scripture, Reformed beliefs on the relationship between church and society, and the impact of the Reformed tradition on the world. We will focus on the role played by the University of Edinburgh and more recently New College itself in the intellectual development and global diffusion of the Reformed tradition.

Plenary Talks

Dr Whitney Gamble-Smith – The Spirit of the Reformation: Tradition, Revolution, and the (Re)Formation of a New World

Dr Gamble-Smith is Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Master’s University. She wrote her PhD in historical and systematic theology at New College under Professor Susan Hardman Moore, and her thesis was published in 2018 under the title Christ and the Law: Antinomianism at the Westminster Assembly. She has contributed articles to the Reformation & Renaissance Review, The Gospel Coalition and Modern Reformation. She has published chapters in Meet the Puritans and Oxford University Press’s recent multivolume work The History of Scottish Theology.

Dr Zachary Purvis – New College, the Free Church and the Wider World.

Dr Purvis is Programme Leader and Lecturer in Church History at Edinburgh Theological Seminary. He completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2014 and was Leverhulme Early Career Postdoctoral Fellow in Divinity at New College between 2015 and 2018, and then Robert M. Kingdon Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2018-19, and Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Göttingen from 2019-21. His book Theology and the University in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford University Press, 2016) won the inaugural Best First Book Prize from the Ecclesiastical History Society in 2017.

Programme

10.00 Welcome from the Head of the School of Divinity, Professor Helen Bond

10.05 Introduction to the conference by Dr James Eglinton, Meldrum Senior Lecturer in Theology at New College

10.15 Plenary address: Dr. Whitney Gamble-Smith‘The Spirit of the Reformation: Tradition, Revolution, and the (Re)Formation of a New World’

11.00 Tea and Coffee11.30 Panel 1: Bible-Believing Biblical Scholarship (Chair: Dr Sara Parvis, Senior Lecturer in Patristics, New College)

12.30 Lunch

1.30 Plenary Address: Dr Zachary Purvis‘New College, the Free Church and the Wider World’

2.15 Panel 2: Reformed Theology in Church and Society (Chair: Matt Baines, PhD candidate, University of Edinburgh)

3.15 Afternoon Tea

3.30 Panel 3: Reformed Theology in the World (Chair: Dr Simon Burton, John Laing Senior Lecturer in Reformation History)

4.30 Closing Remarks: Dr James Eglinton

4.45 Close

This event is free of charge. This is a registration for the in-person event, you can register for the virtual event here. You will receive login credentials the day before the event.

This event is part of celebrations to commemorate the 175th anniversary of the day when Thomas Chalmers laid the foundation stone of New College.